Generating and portraying immersive environments is driven by a desire to incorporate as much richness, detail, depth, and subtlety as possible in order to give an individual experiencing the environment the sensation of being totally immersed in the environment.
Methods of generating and portraying immersive environments generally fall into two categories. In the first category, the immersive environment is experienced in an isolated or individual basis, and in the second category, the immersive environment is experienced in a collaborative fashion or as part of an audience.
For immersive environments in the first category, the mechanism for experiencing the environment disconnects, with varying degrees of effectiveness, the individual from the real environment or real space. This might occur because of the use of goggles and possibly headphones or other transducers of the immersive environment. The goggles (often referred to as head mounted displays,or virtual reality goggles) provide a stereoscopic vision of the immersive environment directly to the viewer. The presence and use of these transducers prevents the individual from sensing the actual or real environment. The transducers are coupled to manipulating equipment such as a joystick or a data glove that allows the individual to directly manipulate and/or maneuver through the environment. In some cases, the transducers convey information to the individual from the environment. It is possible that the transducers also convey information from the individual to a system responsible for generating the environment.
Further, for immersive environments in the first category, an individual's perspective of the environment, with respect to a particular point, is determined by the individual under his or her direction. However, the experience of the immersive environment is isolating in that any benefit which might accrue from the presence of other individuals in the real environment is lost as a result of the use of transducers and manipulating equipment.
The second category of immersive environments allows for interaction between individuals in the real environment while they simultaneously experience the immersive environment. Examples of such environments range from planetariums and IMAX theaters to virtual reality environments and immersive theaters. For immersive environments in the second category, imagery of the immersive environment is projected or displayed onto large viewing screens which are designed to encompass a significant fraction of the audience's field of view and to envelope or surround the viewers in an immersive fashion. Such an environment does not easily provide a means for generating stereoscopic imagery, but the benefits of interaction between different individuals experiencing the same immersive environment can be realized.
For immersive environments in the second category, the perspective on the immersive environment is dictated either in a predetermined fashion, as it may change during the course of a movie playing or presentation unfolding, or under the direction of a single source of control, if the immersive environment is being synthesized in real time. Moreover, all of the individuals within the audience see the same perspective, even though the individuals are located at different spatial locations within the real environment. In the case of the planetarium example, this is acceptable. This is because the stellar objects shown in a planetarium are located so far away that changes in the spatial location of a viewer within the confines of the planetarium would have no perceptible change in the perspective of the viewer. In other words, because the stellar objects are so far away, the view of the stellar objects for any viewer within the confines of the planetarium is the same and is not dependent on the viewer's spatial location within the planetarium.
However, there are many immersive environments which simulate the real world or an object space, for which a viewer's spatial location relative to objects of the real world/object space would determine what the viewer actually sees. For example if the size of the immersive environment is comparable to that of the real space then the perspective of a viewer would be dependent on the spatial location of the viewer. Thus, for example, an individual sitting in a theater the size of a porch, looking at a synthesized view of a garden, would expect his perspective of the garden to change if he moved from one side of the theater (porch) to the other. However, current immersive environments present objects of an object space as though all viewers are located at a particular spatial location, and do not allow for perspective changes in what is seen based on the spatial location of a viewer.